I'd met Robert at a party and he was so enamoured with the lifestyle that he demanded i take him to Berlin with him. He had seemed an exciting guy at first with a sort of puppy-like lust for life which was endearing. Then i spent a night at his place and he made me watch The Secret. If you're not familiar with this BS it's a sort of culty new-age self-help book and film that postulates that you can manifest whatever you want by focusing on it in your mind with the rules of attraction. This is supposedly "the secret" of all successful people. Yeah, exactly, you've probably heard some version of this before. At its most benign, it's saying if you obsess over a car you want you're eventually more likely to get that car than if you're not obsessing over it. At its most pernicious, it blames cancer victims for having "manifested" the disease due to negative thoughts; that actually, they unconsciously want to attract cancer. Yeah, i know, it's fucked up. There's a whole lexicon of terms associated with it and it makes it seem like you just need to be super positive and then positive things will come to you, which anyone who knows me will attest, is complete anathema to my own sort of positive-nihilism/cynical-realism perspective. Anyway, i make an attempt at laying out of Robert why this is all bullshit and just a way for privileged people for whom life goes well to feel really great about themselves and blame individuals for their socio-economic predicament ("just chose to stop being poor, man!". sadly this is a legit call from these types of people). In any case, Robert is making the claim that he had wanted to go travelling and that he had manifested me so this was proof in itself. I started having doubts about bringing this guy to Berlin but whatever. He gave me some Timberland boots which i proceeded to loose within a few weeks, but hey, he knew how to butter up a squatting traveller. I should have taken his brother's word on the matter, which was that Robert was a fucking idiot. His brother seemed pretty cool actually.
So we start hitching and it starts off ok using Hitchbase (god bless you) as a source for the best catch out point. I don't speak dutch so i'm trying to work through Robert to make sure the drivers know they have to let us out on petrol stations that are directly on the motorway. This is a big deal in hitch-hiking. The idea that you just stick out your thumb is kinda bogus. You can do that but it's going to be a slow ride. You want to be at one of those big petrol stations where there are loads of cars coming through and they're going long distance not just little journeys of a few 10s of miles. If you get taken off the motorway all that's going to happen is you're going to spend hours trying to get back on it.
The first couple of rides go well and we're dropped at this big station but to my dissatisfaction i see there's already some hitchers there and they're a boy and a girl, which is better than the boy-boy combo of Robert and myself. Ideal is girl-girl, you'll get a ride fast, boy-girl is ok, but boy-boy can be a bit tough, you know? a lot of lone women will be turned off by that, which of course i understand. if you've got more people with you it's probably best to split up. in fact, sometimes it's easier to split up even if you're only 2. anyway, i chat a bit with this couple and they're basically going exactly the same way so double fuckery; we'll basically have to watch their ride go first and then we'll have to start asking around in earnest. so we see this couple getting a lift after about 20 minutes and we get our mission on approaching people getting out of their cars or coming towards the little shop like "hey sorry do you speak a bit of english im trying to get to berlin and i'm looking if anyone can pick me up and take me part of the way, are you heading that way?" or something like that. i'm particularly looking for dudes with long hair, like ex-hippies, people with weird shit on their cars, sympathetic mothers, bored business people who commute long distance, those sort of demographics. Often people dont quite get what you're asking, so i might stick out a thumb as i'm talking to them to help them get the picture. people dont hitch so often any more but im trying to give them a box they can put me in as quickly as possible like "oh, hitching, i get it, sorry no". it's interesting to see how people's brains work. Some people are like "sure, yeah, what's this?": they're willing before they even know what you're asking. Others are really guarded and are clearly weighing up their kind heartedness with the inherent risks of going along with the requests of strangers. Being young and unassuming helps in such circumstances and i usually shave before hitching to lean on that parental, baby-face sympathy. Eventually some guy picks us up and he drives for about hour over as the light dies.
He's driving super fast and chatting the usual shit, about his car, about sports, a bit of racist commentary thrown in. Robert has no tact and just starts waffling back, like he has no fucking idea how to guide a conversation, like asking random questions that piss the driver off. I try to bring the conversation back to where the next petrol station is. there's nothing worse than seeing one coming up and you start shitting yourself like damn is that the last one before this person veers off onto their own exit? so it gets a bit tense. the guy assures me there's a petrol station. 20 minutes later he's taking an exit. No petrol station in sight. i enquire but he's like no no there is one, but i have the experience to know that this is the beginning of some bullshit and we have just started losing sight of the plan. after what feels like miles and miles he drops us off at this petrol station in the middle of nowhere. It's like 2 pumps, a burger king and a tiny shop. i look around and there's no light on the horizon at all. i know this is going to be shit but Robert is full of beans trying to tell me this is great and exciting and i shouldn't be a problem thinker and he's going to waltz into the burger king and the first person he asks is going to be going directly to Berlin. i raise the point that people going to Berlin are really unlikely to be hanging out in the middle of nowhere off the motorway. Turns out i was right. I walk into the little store - it's a local convenience kind of arrangement, a few truck driver types sitting there with brews watching a tiny TV. I walk in with my mange-cut hair chopped off in random places and weird clothes and all members of the room just kind of shift slightly to glance at me, look me up and down, sort of tut to themselves and get back to their newspapers. I start my spiel about rides to Berlin trying to glean some info on where we are, what direction might take us back to the motorway and the like. I don't even get an audible response. The shop owner just shrugs with as little effort as possible, his lips curling slightly. I get it. fuck off kid.
Robert and I do our best asking every new guest at the petrol stations and BK to take us further to Berlin but honestly it's not much more than one car an hour. We must have been there from about 5pm to 10pm. I eventually go back into the convenience store kinda desperate, knowing it's going to close soon and the shopkeeper actually shows the tiniest bit of sympathy in his eyebrows. He can't believe we're still there and realises we're pretty fucked, out in the middle of nowhere not knowing what we're doing. He kinda sighs and pulls out an A-Z and basically says that there is a place (i can't even remember what city any more) we can walk to that has a train station. It's 16 miles away but there's a path that goes there. This seems like a long shot, but at least it's a shot. I memorise the map i've just been shown and come back out of the store with a bit of hope. Robert acts like this is some kind of law of attraction moment. I'm too weary to argue. We start off on our journey and it turns out this little path that we eventually find is actually a pretty clear cycle path. Brilliant, we have a route.
Along the path our spirits start to pick up. I'd bought some beers at the store for the journey and we stopped to sit under a bridge where a stream had frozen over to roll spliffs on the ice. Back on the road i thought, ok, this is good. We can eventually get to the city and hop a train to Berlin. We weren't even that far. It might have been Magdeburg, i'm not sure, but we were only a 100-200 miles away, i remember that much. We smoked up and walked along this winding but flat and clear path, through various bits of countryside and business parks where we stopped for a photo shoot with a giant chair promoting a furniture store. It was built maybe to a scale of 10X. It took me ages to climb the leg with Robert's help, standing on his back and then his shoulders. Eventually i made it to the plateau of the seat, where i perched like a miniature person with my legs dangling freely with metres of space below me. Again, that photo was lost or else i'd have included it.
We eventually got to the city in the early hours of the morning. We had about an hour to wait for the next train to Berlin so we dozed for a bit before taking on the next part of the journey. It felt like success to have made it to safety but we weren't home yet and we had a whole different obstacle to navigate: train hopping. I'd hopped a few trains before and there are a number of different strategies but Robert was really going for it again with the rules of attraction. We just had to visualise ourselves not getting kicked off and the ticket fucker would unconsciously pick up on this and not ask for our ticket or else let us continue etc. At this point i was so pissed off with all the drivel about manifestation that i yielded, like, ok Robert, let's do this your way, let's actually try this fantastical idea. I even committed internally to myself to give this a real chance, to really try to wish the best outcome upon us.
We boarded the train and for about half an hour i sat there with my eyes closed, imagining the ticket fucker coming and passing us by like Jedi fucking mind tricks. i kept repeating in my head "pass us by. pass us by". I was basically meditating on this visualisation over and over again, replaying different ways we would be impervious to fate when as has happened so many time, i hear the voice "Bitte ihre Fahrkarten". I opened my eyes slightly to see the female ticket fucker standing a few metres away. This as it. I closed my eyes and visualised even harder, seeing her walk past us as if sleepwalking. This, of course, did not happen. I realised i hadn't even thought of anything smart to say when she demanded to see our tickets and Robert didn't have any ideas either. I resorted to kind of shrugging and admitting that we didn't have any. All in all it was one of the softer times i've ever been kicked off a train. I think there was a maternal sympathy there again and it was the first train of the day so she probably surmised that we had been on our way for some time and were not both simultaneously bunking the train on our way to work. We were let our at the next station. To be honest we'd already covered a fair bit of ground. In the aforementioned "number of strategies", this is the least advanced. It comprises simply not doing anything and getting kicked off several times along your journey, but this is usually where people start out coz they dont know any better. Often you'll incur fines but as you're traveling internationally it doesn't really matter that much. You just give them some bullshit details, say you don't have any ID or if they say they're gonna call the cops if you dont produce Id you can show them but then give them a bogus address. Rarely will this come back to bite you as it involves a private company contacting their country's police, who have to contact your country's police and then chasing you down to pay the fine. some companies take this sort of stuff more seriously than others. One friend of mine pointed out that they had ridden the train black from Barcelona all the way to Estonia and accumulated only 2 fines, which they duly paid because when combined still only came to a fraction of the cost of the tickets that would have gotten them there legitimately. Do not quote me on any of this. The brutal reality is that you will learn through the pain of your mistakes and this gives you the knowledge how not to have such problems in future.
Another method is what i now suggested to Robert, my voice now alive with the fire of ifuckingtoldyouso. "i told you the airy fairy pray for everything to work out system was a pile shit! Now we try my method which is constant vigilance!". i laid out that we would spend the rest of the journey in the interstitial zone between carriages. Dutch and German trains often come in double-decker varieties mean there are seats both upstairs and downstairs. This means that as the ticket fucker comes down the train, if you spot them early enough, you can position yourself such that you can loop-the-loop them as they go up or down, you go the other way and loop round to the section they have already checked. Refer to the visual aid below for further clarification. Needless to say, constant vigilance and actually understanding how the system worked proved more effective that clicking our heels three times and saying there's no place like home.
By the time i got home I was fucking wasted having been drinking the whole way and with no sleep the night before. It was bright at Berlin Haupbahnhof and once again i was the mess zig-zagging amongst working people trying to make their 9am starts. I don't remember the full details at this point but it was clear that i had given Robert some cock and bull story about needing to get on some other train and that i'd meet him in a sec but to get the train even if i wasn't there or some such prattle. I was clearly too drunk to pull off this lose-a-child manoeuvre and somehow Robert was soon back at my side trying to tell me about how he thinks i might have been wrong about the platform. "i was trying to manifest you away from me", i said, to which he simply responded "haha, you're such a joker". you had to give it to this guy, he really did stay positive in spite of everything.
I called Moli, who apparently had a new place for us to stay down on Samariterstrasse. You know when you're so drunk you forget you had a phone call with someone to arrange to meet them and then you're really surprised when they show up? yeah, so that happened. "MOLIII! what the fuck are you doing here?" and she's like "my god you're fucking wasted, do you not even remember we agreed to meet here like, 30 minutes ago? here are the fucking keys. try not to lose them before you get home". I didn't lose them and we got home to this squatted apartment above Puke Music, a punk record store at the corner of Sama and Rigaestrasse. Moli was heading out for a few days and Janis and Nico were out hustling i guess. I immediately passed out.
a few nights later i lost my camera. in the meantime, Robert had been coercing Janis and Nico, who were sharing this apartment, into liking him by buying them various crap like cameras and spray paint and whatever, only to have them realise in spite of the gifts, that he was a fucking pillock and that he was just trying to buy favour. i was quickly being accused of having brought an idiot into our midst and when was he going to leave. anyway, so this night we at the Kopi teknokellar for some breakcore night i wanted to go to, with Janis and Robert in tow and i'd been on my usual 1.5L of wine that you could get from Lidl for 1.50 euros that smelled slightly of eggs but was defo the cheapest way to get fucked up. i hadn't quite yet worked out that grape followed by grain is something on a no no and even if someone had told me that at the time i would have told them to go fuck themselves but in any case i had moved on to beers and had started minesweeping at one point which was pretty much a way of life for me as i never had any money. i was so drunk i'd already once left my camera on the bar and come back to it. honestly, i was so drunk it would have been a miracle for me NOT to have lost the camera. one of the only ways i could rationalise the loss of the camera later was that it was a complete wonder that i hadn't lost the camera earlier given my lifestyle at the time, all the raves and parties and drunken nights. of course it wasn't the camera that was the painful part of it, but the memories stored in the photos themselves. it was hundreds of photos from one of the most eventful periods of my life. in contrast, during my 8 years of studies later in life i probably generated a small handful of photos that held any meaning.
anyway, i was so wasted i'd forgotten i brought the camera and only realised i'd left it after we'd left. i demanded we all go back to look for it and spent a good hour hunting like a drunken idiot in every crevice, not only in the venue space, but also in the rest of the house in the living spaces, defiantly ignoring the near certainty that the camera was long gone by now, probably whisked miles away. Obviously we eventually got kicked out by people who were like what the fuck are you doing rummaging around in my kitchen for a camera you lost at a gig downstairs, get the fuck out of my house you fucking bum. we started walking home. i was so drunk i was falling over on the icy roads every few metres, and really that's not even an exaggeration. the next day i had bruises all up my legs and onto my hips, my arms, face, everywhere. the floor was really giving me a pummelling tonight and not for the first time. after again drunkenly demanding to go back to Kopi to hopelessly search for my camera and generally being a complete mess, Janis had had enough of me and was happy to watch me faceplant repeatedly, offering no support.
the next morning Robert was like "man, you were so drunk last night. Actually you fully clocked me in the face, like, on three separate occasions man"
"coz you're a fucking idiot Robert. i'd do it again" i said, dying in my bed, hungover to shit. I knew this was going to be one of those 3 day hangovers.
"i guess you were manifesting it", i cough-chuckled to myself.
i had tried to put this guy on the wrong train, regularly berated him for being a fucking idiot, had punched him cold in the face three times and this guy still wasn't getting the hint. Even after he finally left Berlin some weeks later (not because he finally acknowledged that he was unwelcome with us, but because suddenly something was calling him back; some lame idea/project he had) he would send me messages like "Hey, I'm running for election in Holland. Got any cool ideas?" or "Hey, i've got a plan. are you in Berlin? do you know any struggling fashion designers or hot boys?"
I think Robert was probably a narcissist.
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